This is especially meaningful now with the big news that Iran has shipped 25,000 lbs. of low-grade uranium to Russia, thus bringing very close the date upon which $100 billion worth of Iranian assets will become unfrozen by financial establishments worldwide. Iran will also be free then to sell oil on the world market, something current sanctions disallow, and participate in world financial operations.
Question: Since Russia is a cheek-by-jowl ally of Iran, what will happen to the uranium, which was 20% pure and being processed toward nuclear-bomb use? Former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi shipped his weapons of mass destruction to the U.S. soon after the Iraq War came on line in 2003, but Qaddafi was not a U.S. ally and, in any case, this nation had no known use for the material, already able to virtually wipe out the world with its arsenal.
This is not true vis-a-vis Putin's situation. The shipped material can be brought on line in Russia, with its refinement continued and then shipped back to Iran or simply made a part of Putin's arsenal. That Putin has designs on the enlargement of both Russian territory and influence worldwide is obvious by his actions regarding Ukraine.
All the major intelligence agencies worldwide such as Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad and Russia's FSB, not to mention the CIA, agreed in 2002 that Saddam had WMD in-country and, as already proven in his gassing of the Kurds and Iranians (during his war of the 1980s with Iran), could be expected to use it. Between September 2002 and February 2003, he shipped it out, probably to Syria, just using trucks at night.
Saddam had finally agreed to allow inspectors back into Iraq but delayed their entry from September to December of 2002 and then monitored where they could go, making their work useless. Despite the administration's insistence that Iran (with 24 days notice) must allow inspectors on Iranian military bases, the official word from Khameini is that this will NEVER happen, so the whole deal is back to square one realistically, though the administration will crow that a diplomatic victory has been gained.
As my friend indicated, the Iranians can be expected to continue their nuclear program somewhere, all agreements not worth the paper on which they're written, as was the case in 2002 when North Korea finally had to admit that its nuclear-arms effort had continued in direct violation of its 1994 agreement with the U.S. to the effect that the program would be shut down in exchange for help in building two nuclear reactors for peaceful objectives.
This admission came despite the fact that a U.S.-led consortium came up with the $4.6 billion for the power plants in December 1999. North Korea set off a seismic reaction when it made its second nuclear-bomb test in May 2009. In the Iranian mode, the North Koreans had hoodwinked the U.S. big-time. Obama and State Secretary Kerry will ballyhoo this great Iranian uranium-shipment as a colossal diplomatic victory but it means nothing except that Iran will now have access to enough money to do as it pleases.
The flimflam continues regarding the fight against ISIS, in which Obama and Kerry speak of the fight as belonging to the U.S. when in reality it's being conducted by both the ayatollah Khameini in Tehran and Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The U.S. has averaged about three airstrikes a day since last summer and has had no combatants in any strength on the ground.
Obama would show real intelligence if he withdrew all U.S. personnel from the Middle East as early as yesterday, told the arm-chair generals and colonels on Fox News to go fly a kite and let these worthies fight it out without any further loss of U.S. blood and treasure. The emphasis should be on homeland security (mainly rooting out Muslim cells), not being policeman to the world.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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